Lightweight display manager for xfce?

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On sam., 2011-05-28 at 12:04 -0700, Auke Kok wrote:
> On 05/28/2011 12:56 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> > On ven., 2011-05-27 at 21:37 -0700, Auke Kok wrote:
> >> On 05/26/2011 11:07 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> >>   >  Note that I've quickly tried uxlaunch on my Debian. It might be related
> >>   >  to some integration lacking, but it failed to use consolekit properly.
> >>   >
> >>   >  When running directly startxfce4 or xfce4-session, it won't start the
> >>   >  consolekit daemons.
> >>
> >> console-kit-daemon needs to be running before uxlaunch starts. It's up
> >> to the ConsoleKit packager to assure it's running before uxlaunch starts.
> >>
> >> of course, systemd should start it on-demand for you if you're lucky
> >> enough to use that.
> >
> > Well, I don't know about systemd (and frankly the first impression I
> > have is “scary”). I'm not too sure why consolekit would have to be run
> > before uxlaunch though. uxlaunch by itself doesn't need any permissions
> > so only stuff launched by it require it. Or am I mistaken?
> 
> we're using a minimal design - console-kit-daemon should really be run 
> independently of a X11 session so it can manage more than just 1 session 
>   (e.g. ssh logins, vc/? logons), so it doesn't make much sense to 
> enabled it in uxlaunch.

I find that weird for a daemon which is supposed to handle stuff for one
user only :)
> 
> Perhaps this is a bit confusing, but uxlaunch is really meant as a "do 
> everything as the user" type application. While it is started as root, 
> it immediately drops privileges before it actually does anything 
> significant.
> 
> > Right now, if consolekit is launched by uxlaunch before startxfce4, the
> > issue is the same as with slim (before patch) and xdm, the session is
> > marked as non local.
> 
> console-kit-daemon needs to be started as root before uxlaunch runs, and 
> you shouldn't use startxfce4, but uxlaunch should run `xfce4-session` 
> instead as session program.

xfce4-session by itself is usually not enough, it lacks stuff which is
not yet run by xdg/autostart (xscreensaver, xrdb stuff etc.)
> 
> I'm figuring this is what messes up: startxfce4 has a ton of shell code 
> that starts a new consolekit seat, and so the two that are now created 
> conflict, or the current one is modified wrongly.

Nop, startxfce4 works just fine, if there's already a consolekit daemon
it doesn't do anything, that's all. Same thing with dbus, ssh-agent etc.
While I do agree that starting those shouldn't be done in startxfce4
(because adding support for all that stuff there is painful and a never
ending task), it just works fine with the current state of things.
> 
> If someone has some time to debug/document this for debian, I can maybe 
> work with them to figure it out how to integrate on debian in the 
> "intended" way.

The “default” config file advertises to use xfce4-session, I manually
changed it to do the right thing, which is Xsession and startxfce4.

> the uxlaunch.log file should give a ton of hints too - feel free to send 
> me that+stdout.

For now I've just removed it and switched back to gdm (2), since I need
the box to work, but when I have time I'll give it another chance.

Regards,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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